Budget 2024: what schools need to know – Tim Warneford featured in TES Magazine
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has laid out the Labour government’s first Budget – including its school spending plans for 2025-26 – indicating that core school funding will increase by £2.3 billion a year.
Extra capital funding for crumbling school buildings
The DfE will get £6.7 billion in capital funding next year which means that there will be more money for crumbling school buildings.
Of this, £1.4 billion is to deliver on the existing School Rebuilding Programme, which was announced in 2020 and aims to rebuild or refurbish about 500 schools in a decade.
£2.1 billion has been allocated for school maintenance – an increase of £300 million compared with this year.
Whilst the extra capital investment is welcome, teaching unions have wanted that the rebuilding plan is “woefully unambitious” and the money is not enough to restore the school estate to an acceptable condition.
Tim Warneford welcomed the £300 million increase in maintenance funding saying:
“It would be ideal if this is targeted at the Condition Improvement Fund pot, as this has remained static over the past several years and the number of projects funded has been going down.”
Read the full article here.
